| Abstrakt: |
Recent studies on anthroponyms have paid attention to the meanings of African personal names, have explored naming patterns and practices, and have investigated their communicative functions. Some of these studies explored personal names given to children born from polygamous families, names reflecting circumstances around the birth of children, experiences and wishes of the name-givers and naming as an empowerment tool for the name-givers. Little attention has been paid to the linguistic aspect of personal names, such as compounding or the word formation process. As such this article focuses on how the interface between naming and compounding shapes the construction of Zulu personal names. The study was qualitative in nature and ten participants were conveniently selected, and a face-to-face interview was used to collect data. Parts of the data were collected from documents such as university graduation programmes that list the names of graduands. Ethnopragmatic, onomasiological and social identity theories are used to navigate through the corpora used in this article. The main finding of the study is that Zulu compounding personal names are formed from a verb plus noun, e.g. -banga (verb) + indlala (noun) = Bangindlala (noun - personal name), noun plus verb (stem), e.g. Nkosi (noun) + -nathi (pronoun) = Nkosinathi (noun), noun plus adjective, e.g. imbali (noun) + -nhle (adjective) = Mbalenhle (noun), verb plus verb, e.g. -fanele (auxiliary verb) + si (concord) + -bonge (verb) + Fanelesibonge (noun) and noun plus possessive pronoun, e.g. gugu (noun) + lethu (possessive pronoun) = Gugulethu (noun). The findings further reveal that, apart from the word formation, the meaning behind the new word was taken into consideration. Specifically, the aspirations of the name-giver were reflected in the Zulu personal names constructed through the process of compounding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
